On the first day of this month, in a small ceremony on the City Hall steps next to a bus stop, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flipped the switch on the city's Christmas tree.
Villaraigosa, as always, was dressed in a nice suit. But the mayor might as well have been wearing a yellow shirt with a zigzag black line.
Good grief! This tree wasn't just tiny.
It was Charlie Brown small.
Officially, the city's Douglas fir is 25 feet tall. There is another tree of similar stature inside City Hall, but that one looks better because it comes within a few feet of touching the rotunda's chandelier.
In New York City this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg lighted a 74-foot tree in Rockefeller Center, while Mayor Richard M. Daley illuminated an 85-footer in Chicago's Daley Plaza.
Up north, in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom did the honors on a 100-foot Monterey cypress that resides in Golden Gate Park.
In Roseville, a suburb of Sacramento -- say it out loud so it sinks in -- Mayor Gina Garbolino helped light a 28-foot Colorado blue spruce in front of a crowd estimated at 1,500.
Even the Grove, the fake Italian village in the Fairfax district, has a 100-foot tree -- which Villaraigosa helped light. The Grove isn't even a city! It's a shopping mall!
Down in Orange County, the Fashion Island shopping mall erected a 115-foot white fir it had purchased from a tree farm near Mt. Shasta.
It should be said that cities have wrestled with their Christmas trees for decades, and some clearly take it more seriously than others.
A few years ago, Miami bragged that it had the tallest, only to learn it had paid $200,000 for a tree shorter than Fashion Island's behemoth.
In 2002, in the English burg of Ripon, local pol and taxi driver Tony Simpson forced a change in tree after complaining that the town's 20-footer was "too puny," according to the Harrogate Advertiser.
Simpson told the local council "in no uncertain terms" that the tree was "a disgrace and only fit for firewood," the Advertiser reported.
The local council quickly found a taller tree for the mayor to light that evening.
A council that listens. Interesting concept, eh?
Anyway, back at Los Angeles City Hall, the official Christmas tree has been living a lonely existence on Spring Street since the lighting ceremony.
Occasionally, someone will clomp up the steps and look at it. Smokers taking a break from City Council meetings can sometimes be seen taking a puff by it.
